Love Streams (1984)

That was an excellent one.

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It was wonderful seeing John Cassavetes and wife Gena Rowlands play brother and sister, each with serious sanity issues, in 'Love Streams' (I had only previously seen them together in the stellar 'Opening Night', my favourite Cassavetes film), from a script he co-wrote with the author of the 1980 stage play, Ted Allan (Cassavetes' character, Robert Harmon, was originally played by Jon Voight on stage). While his earliest film, 'Shadows', is least pleasing to me simply because I don't feel his cast there was of the quality necessary to handle that large degree of spontaneity and improvisation, by two decades later, he had refined (and perhaps perfected) his approach, and it's a great day for the two stars as well as stock company mainstay Seymour Cassel, who's always a treat to see. I strongly urge that if you have a sibling you love but currently have problems relating with, to take the time, watch the film with them, and learn something about yourself. This is probably the finest moment of Golan-Globus Films as well...

having seen and studied all of cassavete's films repeatedly i must say this is my favorite and one of his very best. there is such a wonderful array of emotions going on here and complex character development. we have his amazing camera, the stunning long takes of faces smiling staring really in the moment like no other acting i have ever seen on the big screen. each series of decisions by the protagonists gets us further involved in their struggles and triumphs. this film is very challenging for first time cassavetes' viewers, but well worth returning to year after year. cinema just doesn't get this good. if you like to think and want something really unique and special check this out.

I saw "Love Streams" in Madrid, this past summer in the "Filmoteca Nacional" inside the retrospective of Cassavetes and I was so impacted that I started to search this film, like a crazy. Cassavetes plays a very hard character making a depressed and empty of love man, a looser. And Gena also plays a wonderful character: his dizzy sister. Imprescindible, wonderful, winner with the "Golden Bear" and Cassavetes plays the best character i've ever seen in my life. Please, if you listen this film, see it and search films of Cassavetes. The best of Cassavetes is 1º: Love Streams, 2º: Husbands and 3º: Faces. His way of work allows him to transmit us a lot of feelings. Casssavetes knew that he would probably left a few months to die and he shots his own death and, making us to reflex into the human been. I cried a lot

I've seen five of Cassavetes' films, and for all of them, there is a long adjustment time. His filmmaking is so unique that it's initially off-putting. But if you stay with his films, you will soon find yourself engrossed. I wonder if that is one of the reasons most of his movies were so long--to allow for the audience to adjust. In this film, he introduces us to two extremely damaged individuals and we don't realize until the second hour that they are brother and sister. You get a real feel for the "home movie" method writer/director/star Cassavetes employed and the house in this movie looks exactly like the house from A Woman Under the Influence, so was this actually their house??? It is just as messy and oddly decorated, as if it had not been picked up in nearly ten years. This movie doesn't seem to have much of a plot, although it plays like an interpretation of Shakespeare's The Tempest. I wonder if this was Cassevetes' intent as he appeared in a modern version of The Tempest (directed by Paul Mazursky) two years before this movie came out. This film could have been a real endurance test as some scenes go on forever. But anyone interested in seeing what has been called Cassevetes' most personal film, and a late career example of his style, should see this. It plays like a swan song to him as he died a few years after he made this. He seemed to have a fondness for serving alcohol to little kids, as this is the third movie I've seen of his where this happens. I haven't mentioned Gena Rowlands--she's just as good here as she was in Faces or Woman Under the Influence. She plays her sick character so well that you really believe that she could bring home all of those barnyard animals. I would not recommend this to anyone looking for entertainment but if you want to see something you surely will not forget anytime soon, then watch this.